New iPhone Application Provides Work to Refugees
CrowdFlower & Samasource tap the cloud to fight poverty in Africa.
San Francisco, CA (PRWEB) October 13, 2009 -- Samasource and CrowdFlower today announced the new Give Work iPhone application. iPhone users with a penchant for doing good can now use their phones to support refugees working in a Dadaab, Kenya datacenter - at the world's largest refugee site - by donating their time, not money.
Samasource's Refugee Work Program trains refugees in technology-based skills and then puts those skills to use by connecting the trained refugees to stable, dignified work. CrowdFlower built the Give Work iPhone application, based on its crowdsourcing technology, in order to enable users to directly provide meaningful, paying work to refugees in the Samasource program.
"Working with CrowdFlower and iPhone users, the refugees we train in Kenya develop portable work skills and receive higher wages," says Leila Chirayath Janah, founder of Samasource. "By training women, youth and refugees to complete paying remote tasks, we give them the ability to build livelihoods and become part of the digital economy."
The idea behind Give Work is to list a host of quick and easy tasks, from CrowdFlower customers, to be completed by the end users of the application. Each task is real work for a real company. Tasks may include creating key words for images or video clips to make them more searchable in a database, classifying text or finding points of interest online or in the real-world for numerous questions.
The free app will let iPhone users directly help refugees in Africa get computer-based work experience and a paycheck through crowdsourced labor. Each task a refugee completes is given to an app user to verify - and the refugee gets paid for the work. For example:
| | - A company in the Midwest needs online images checked for copyright issues so submits the job to CrowdFlower
- A refugee in a Kenyan datacenter is checking pictures for copyrights
- An American iPhone user gives some of their time checking the same pictures to verify the refugees work
|
All of this happens in a matter of minutes: the company gets quality work results, the iPhone user has fun and kills time while helping the world, and a refugee who was disenfranchised and unable to work is suddenly earning income.
Using CrowdFlower's Labor as a Service crowdsourcing technology, worker's accuracy must be verified by at least one other worker for validation and quality assurance. Each task completed by the user of the Give Work app will also be assigned to trained refugees in Dabaab before it is finalized for the CrowdFlower customer. As a result, the Give Work users become direct enablers of refugee work, validating their work and allowing them to get paid for completing tasks.
"Our goal in building CrowdFlower was to usher in a new era of work centered on an on-demand, online workforce that can provide accurate results for a variety of tasks," says Lukas Biewald, CEO of CrowdFlower. "This partnership with Samasource is the first chance we have had to use the technology to bring work to a community in need - providing both wages and increased computer literacy." Not only will users be doing good with Give Work, but they can also have fun. The application works like a game, with competition and interaction among users.
Give Work is free to download from the Apple iTunes App Store and is available now.
About Samasource
Samasource gives marginalized people, from refugees in Kenya to women in rural Pakistan, life-changing work opportunities via the Internet. In parallel, it enables socially responsible companies, small businesses, nonprofits, and entrepreneurs in the U.S. to contribute to economic development by buying services from the Samasource workforce at fair prices. Samasource derives its name from the Sanskrit word sama, which means "equal". Samasource is a 501(c)(3) non-profit social business. Thus far, Samasource has found projects for various small businesses, nonprofit training centers, and rural data centers that provide dignified jobs to more than 500 marginalized individuals in Kenya, Uganda, Cameroon, Ghana, and Pakistan. For more information, please visit www.samasource.org, blog.samasource.org, or email info@samasource.org.
About CrowdFlower
CrowdFlower provides Labor as a Service (LaaS) by letting customers access an always-on, scalable workforce. Unlike traditional methods of outsourcing and hiring which require major lead time and lots of wasteful overhead, CrowdFlower's web offering allows businesses to instantly access thousands of workers without even picking up the phone. CrowdFlower's statistical quality control technology finally makes cloud labor a sustainable business reality through accuracy guarantees and efficient use of workers. Founded in December 2007 and headquartered in San Francisco, CrowdFlower is funded by Freestyle Capital, Founder's Fund, K9 Ventures, Quest Venture Partners and Felicis Ventures. For more information, please visit www.crowdflower.com, or email info(at)crowdflower.com.
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